


Ghost in the Keys

by Dott



Category: Monster High
Genre: Drabble Collection, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-05
Updated: 2018-07-01
Packaged: 2019-02-11 01:31:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,366
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12924420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dott/pseuds/Dott
Summary: Drabbles, odds and ends, and things of that nature about the students of Monster High. Mostly Cleo and Deuce.Recently, I asked for drabble prompts on Tumblr, and I'd like a place to share those. I'd also like a place to share anything that I never ended up finishing, but that I'm still proud of. Might include things for AUs, too.





	1. Not Wearing That (Cleo x Deuce)

“Are you sure?”

Deuce’s eyes snapped back to the suit Cleo was examining, bringing his thoughts with them. He hadn’t been distracted, but was rather trying to gauge what else the store had in stock. There was a rack of particularly interesting ties not too far from where they were standing.

He adjusted his shades and tilted his head. “It’s flashy, isn’t it?”

“Of course, but imagine how it would look with that gown I have.” She lightly pinched the suit’s sleeve in her fingertips and brought it closer to examine it. It was flashy, alright; every square inch of it was sequined gold.

It wasn’t that Deuce minded flashy (he was dating Cleo, of course he liked flashy), he just preferred it in smaller doses when he wore it himself, and this suit was an overdose and a half.

He gestured towards it. “It matches your dress, yeah, but it’s got the same amount of presence. I wouldn’t want to take any spotlight away from you.”

“Hmmm.” Cleo squinted her eyes. “Maybe you’re right. I’m just ambitious because we haven’t got a match for that dress yet, and you know I’m itching to wear it to the winter formal.”

“Silver might fit the winter theme better.”

“Fat chance. Gold makes me look like a goddess.”

“Can’t argue with that.” He took her by the arm and led her to the neckwear display. “Here, I noticed a gold tie a few minutes ago. Maybe you can find some cuff links to pair it with.”


	2. Proposal (Cleo x Deuce)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scene: the two are in their 30's and living together.

Deuce woke up to the sound of makeup containers against a marble surface.

Yawning, he pulled his sleep mask off, eyes still closed, and slipped his sunglasses on. He used to have to reach for a moment to find his glasses in the morning, but as he got older he was always able to retrieve them with pinpoint accuracy.

When his eyes were shielded and he could properly look around, he saw the room he loved and had grown so accustomed to over the past few years. Cleo had hired a team of interior designers to almost completely overhaul the inside of the mansion they had moved into a few years back, and it was now an elegant Greco-Egyptian palace on the inside. 

When his eyes drifted over to the bedroom’s vanity, he saw the princess he loved a hundred times more.

Cleo was putting on makeup, her usual morning routine, and was the cause of the plastic clinking that Deuce had woken up to. 

This was a common occurrence, him waking up to almost this exact image: Cleo in front of her mirror (it was hers, not theirs, because Deuce never used it), choosing what shade of eyeshadow she would wear. He knew what they were doing that day solely by what color she chose. Brown or a natural color was for a day at home, turquoise would likely be for meeting friends, and so on. 

Depending on the weather, she would sometimes have the sun shining down on her from their window, and sometimes not. When the sun was out, she would glow even more than she normally did, and the gold tips on her fingernails would glint in the light. The sunbeams would accentuate the subtle highlights in her hair as it draped down her back. 

This was what Deuce woke up to nearly every morning, and nearly every morning he said “Good morning, babe,” and she would smile and say the same thing. Nearly every morning, he thought about how she was the most beautiful person he had ever seen, and that included the Olympians.

This morning, something was different. He still thought about how she was beautiful and perfect and ethereal, of course, but the something that was different was his reaction.

Today, he paused. She noticed. She turned towards him, half-finished with applying her mother’s shade of lipstick, and her eyebrows arched. It was his turn, and she expected him to go first, or else she would begin suspecting something was wrong.

He blinked. She blinked, and her false eyelashes moved like a palm leaf fan. 

He stared at her for a moment longer, taking in every detail of everything in the room and how perfect all of it looked. How perfect his life looked. Cleo’s eyebrows stayed arched.

Deuce blinked again. “Marry me?”


	3. Shooting Star (Elle x Astranova)

Elle’s CPU whirred, the joints in her knuckles curling a bit as Astranova’s knee touched hers under the table. Astra didn’t seem to notice; she was engrossed in the book in front of them.

The Boo York Public Library wasn’t very busy at the moment, and the two had managed to find a quiet spot where Astra could learn about the planet she had recently woken up on. It was quiet until Elle was alone with her, at least.

The robot was a nervous wreck. She didn’t understand why, she was always cool and collected when she had her turntables in front of her and a crowd chanting her name. Maybe that was the problem; she was getting too antsy from the quiet.

Or maybe the problem was that she couldn’t tell if this was a date or not.

Astranova had come to Elle, specifically Elle, and her eyes and skin looked like the night sky even though it was broad daylight out (thinking about it made her cooling system run). She asked her to teach her about the Earth, and Elle figured there was no place better than the library.

And now, here they were, and some cyclops was giving her the stink eye as he left the room because she wouldn’t stop buzzing, but it wasn’t her fault that Astranova looked like she was learning the secrets of the universe just by reading about America’s cultural customs.

Elle was snapped out of her daze when Astra looked up and pointed at a section of book with one of her three long fingers. Her voice was, as always, careful and elegant. “Wishing on a shooting star?”

Elle’s eye shutters blinked. “Huh?”

“A shooting star. Is that something monsters do here?”

“Oh. Uh, yeah, definitely.” She looked at the page, and saw it was a chapter on luck and superstition. 

“This is all very strange to me.” Astra pursed her shimmering lips. “Why would wishing on a star grant your wish? Normal stars have no magical property.”

“I dunno. They look kinda magical, don’t they?”

“I suppose so.”

“You know, we… I thought you were a shooting star at first. In your spaceship and all.”

Astranova tilted her head in genuine interest. “Really?”

Elle would have blushed if she had skin. “Yeah. I didn’t really wish for anything. But…”

There was a pause, and she looked at the table, wondering if her next words would sound creepy. “…but I might as well have had a wish granted, cause now I’m friends with you.”

Astranova beamed, and Elle did the same back. Wordlessly, Astra took Elle’s hand under the wooden table, and went back to reading. Elle went back to mind-wandering, but now it was of the blissful variety instead of the nervous kind. 


	4. Sunlight (Cleo x Deuce)

Sunlight has meant many things to Cleo.

When she was a young child, a hot sun was the standard. She never gave a single thought to it, letting it warm her as her mother taught her how to tend to the flowers in the queen’s garden.

Her viewpoint on the sun very quickly changed after she was tombed. Trapped in the dark, she missed the light it brought almost as much as she missed her mother. She had taken it for granted before, she realized that now. She vowed to be grateful for things like that if she ever got out of this cold hole in the ground.

After the earthquake broke a hole in the roof of the tomb, she spent more time in the beam of sunlight than both her father and her sister combined. It was a safe aura, a blanket from the darkness (until it was nighttime, that is).

Once she was out of the tomb, the sight of dawn was a sign of survival. She had survived another night without the sun to protect her, she had survived another day in the house with her father, and she had survived another twenty-four hours without her mother. It was just that: survival.

And then she met Deuce.

Sometime in September of her freshman year, she was introduced to him, and she began dating him November 1st of that same year. 

And suddenly, life wasn’t just about survival anymore. 

It was about enjoying the sport of fearleading itself, instead of only enjoying the leadership position her sister left to her. It was about slowly befriending the new ghoul because Frankie finally wore her down with kindness. It was about trying not to let her father get to her anymore, because the people she went to school with  _mattered_  to her, they weren’t just pawns.

Loving Deuce taught her how to love, and that, in and of itself, was like sunlight to her.


	5. Industrial Apocalypse AU (Cleo x Deuce)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this one takes a little bit of explaining, since there's not a ton of context in the story itself.
> 
> Basically, I was inspired by a Tumblr post about a group of teenagers growing up in a community trapped inside a building, due to the air outside being toxic to breathe. Each of the teenagers had some kind of condition; one had a clockwork heart, one was really frail, etc. This is basically the same as that. 
> 
> In this AU, Deuce was born with tough skin (kinda reptilian) and Cleo is really susceptible to sickness. She's basically the frail one, which I did to counter her personality. 
> 
> This isn't anything super-developed or long, it was just something self-indulgent I wrote based on daydreams in class. It's never going to be a full fic, or long enough for a standalone oneshot, but I still like the pieces I wrote, so here you go!

“Come outside with me.”

“Now that’s crazy.”

“I mean it. I’ve went with some other people before. I’ve seen it and I want you to see it, too; it’s beyond sick.”

“I'm beyond sick, too. Not all of us were born with skin like yours, Deuce. I don’t know what would happen if the atmosphere came in contact with me.”

“We could nab a bodysuit and some gas masks, I bet.”

“You’re really pushing this, aren’t you?”

“Cleo, I’ve seen a sunrise. Like, in real life, not on a TV screen.”

“Tempting. Deuce, you know I like you, but this idea is idiotic. We could get caught…. I could die.”

“I didn’t die when I went, and I’d make one hundred percent sure you were safe if you went. I promise. One sign of anything bad, and we stop immediately.”

“Alright, I tell you what. I’ll think about it, but only if you make me some more of those cookies.”

“Deal.”

* * *

 

Deuce reached the top of the stairs and walked toward a wall that was facing the sun. It couldn’t even be called a wall; almost none of it was left, aside from a few support beams.

Once they were near the edge, he carefully set Cleo down on an overturned shelf which could function as a bench for them.

Her eyes were already locked on the sky. The sun was casting a soft glow over everything now as it rose, and the horizon was a million different shades of orange. They hadn’t quite got there in time to see it start, but it was still beautiful.

Deuce sat next to her, and they instinctively scooted closer to each other, grabbing each other’s hands in the place of talking. They figured they may as well act like they led normal lives, like the entire Earth didn't have to live in quarantined buildings, like if they took their masks off they wouldn't die in a matter of minutes.

* * *

 

As they returned, the airlock shut behind them with a hissing noise, and they waited until the connecting door to the maintenance hallway was open before removing their gas masks and head coverings.

Once his mask was off, Deuce didn’t even get a chance to speak before Cleo took his face in her hands and kissed him.

It wasn’t exactly as he has imagined it happening – he had daydreamed about it happening during the sunrise itself (despite the impossibility of this due to the air outside -- it was a daydream), or, more realistically, in one of their rooms after having a long, intimate talk.

He had pictured it as something poetic, like you’d find in one of the books they had in the library, the books where teenagers were allowed to run around wherever they wanted and have adventures. Books where the consequence of sneaking out was getting grounded, not losing their lives. Books where teenagers kissed in picture-perfect conditions, with the perfect indie soundtrack in the background of their novel's movie adaption.

But Cleo and Deuce hadn’t even left the dusty basement hall where they had snuck out, and machinery was making a racket around them, and it was so dimly lit down there he could barely see her, and they hadn’t changed out of the ugly protective suits yet.

And somehow, despite all this, it was more perfect than he could have ever imagined. He could have written an entire, brand new book on how perfect it was.

His arms circled around her waist as her hands moved to rest on the back of his neck, and his eyes were closed but he could see stars in the void behind his eyelids. It burned where her hands and his skin were touching, but in a good way.

One of her thumbs was tenderly stroking the scales on the back of his neck. He felt his face get hotter than it already was. It made him feel a bit sheepish that she was being loving towards the parts of his skin that were scaled, that didn't feel normal, but she was treating it no differently than the rest of him. It occurred to Deuce that if Cleo found the things worthy of her affection, they couldn’t possibly be bad.

A moment later, the breakfast announcement went off, muffled by the concrete floor above them and the machines, pulling them back to Earth. Their faces broke apart, but they kept their arms around each other.

He wanted to pull her closer to him, but was afraid hugging any tighter might hurt her. “I, uh–”

A smile teased the corners of her lips. “I wasn’t going to go back until I said thank you. So there you go.”

“Have we really gotta go back now?”

“The air down here isn’t as bad as outside, but it’s still pretty nasty. Believe me, if I could skip breakfast and hide down here with you forever, I would.”

“Alright.”

She kissed him again, quicker this time. “Carry me up the ladder. I don’t want to be out of breath when we get back. Or, we can hide in my room instead.”


End file.
